What will be the impact on safety and the human being? Will accidents be finally eliminated? Will we be immune to making errors? What’s the role of human factors in all that?
Industry 4.0 is not just another corporate buzz phrase. It’s a reality already for some companies and will be a reality for many more in the next few years. Part of the appeal of 4.0 is that automation will eventually cost less than human labour and that robots are potentially more reliable in terms of quality and productivity. For health and safety, some of the appeal of a 4.0 factory of the future will be zero injuries because there are zero workers.
Even with less workers, the factory of the future will never be workerless, and those remaining will face new and different challenges to their personal safety as the job they do and the environment in which they work changes. However, they will still need to deal with human factors like rushing, frustration, fatigue and complacency, and how those states cause critical errors and compromised decisions. In fact, more than 95% of accidental injuries are predicated by one or more of these four states, and this isn’t going away anytime soon.
Content details of “Safety and Industry 4.0”
- Author: David Hughes
- Format: PDF file
- Length: 4 pages
- File size: 939 kb
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